ory
that they came originally to the Nile valley from the shores of the Red
Sea by way of the Wadi Hammamat, which debouches on to the Nile in the
vicinity of Koptos and Kus, opposite Ballas and Tukh. The supposition
seems a very probable one, and it may well be that the earliest
Egyptians entered the valley of the Nile by the route suggested and
then spread northwards and southwards in the valley. The fact that their
remains are not found north of el-Kawamil nor south of el-Kab might
perhaps be explained by the supposition that, when they had extended
thus far north and south from their original place of arrival, they
passed from the primitive Neolithic condition to the more highly
developed copper-using culture of the period which immediately preceded
the establishment of the monarchy. The Neolithic weapons of the Fayyum
and Hel-wan would then be the remains of a different people, which
inhabited the Delta and Middle Egypt in very early times. This people
may have been of Mediterranean stock, akin to the primitive inhabitants
of Palestine, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and they no doubt were identical
with the inhabitants of Lower Egypt who were overthrown and conquered by
Kha-sekhem and the other Southern founders of the monarchy (who belonged
to the race which had come from the Red Sea by the Wadi Hammamat), and
so were the ancestors of the later natives of Lower Egypt. Whether the
Southerners, whose primitive remains we find from el-Kawamil to el-Kab,
were of the same race as the Northerners whom they conquered, cannot
be decided. The skull-form of the Southerners agrees with that of the
Mediterranean races. But we have no necropoles of the Northerners to
tell us much of their peculiarities. We have nothing but their flint
arrowheads.

But it should be observed that, in spite of the present absence of all
primitive remains (whether mere flints, or actual graves with bodies and
relics) of the primeval population between the Fayyum and el-Kawamil,
there is no proof that the primitive race of Upper Egypt was not
coterminous and identical with that of the lower country. It
might therefore be urged that the whole Neolithic population was
"Mediterranean" by its skull-form and body-structure, and specifically
"Nilotic" (indigenous Egyptian) in its culture-type. This is quite
possible, but we have again to account for the legends of distant origin
on the Red Sea coast, the probability that one element of the Egyptian
populati